RDM with OLA

From wiki.openlighting.org

RDM devices can be configured through the web interface (only partially complete) or from the command line. Even if you don't have any RDM devices you can still experiment using the fake RDM device created by the Dummy Plugin.

Contents

Device Discovery

Each RDM device has a unique ID (UID) made up of a two byte manufacturer ID and a four byte device ID. The ola_rdm_discovery tool displays the UIDs found for each universe.

$ ola_rdm_discover -u 1
7a70:ffffff00

A single device should be found with a manufacturer ID of 7a70 (Open Lighting) and a device ID of ffffff00 (the dummy device).

Passing the -f option will force the discovery algorithm to be run for the particular universe. This won't produce any output unless an error occurs.

$ ola_rdm_discover -u 1 -f

Device Configuration

Now that a device has been found, we can query it to find the parameters it supports. Each parameter is assigned a two byte identifier known as a PID. The ola_rdm_get and ola_rdm_set commands are used to read / write the values of parameters. The first thing to do is to view a list of all known parameters:

Here we see some general information about the device including the DMX start address and the # of DMX channels used (DMX Footprint). We can also get the DMX start address by using the dmx_start_address parameter directly:

Manufacturer Specific PIDs

The dummy devices also support one manufacturer specific PID, to allow you to experiment with those features, which returns the current OLA version.

RDM With ArtNet

If you have a copy of DMXWorkshop, you can experiment with RDM over ArtNet by patching an ArtNet Input Port to the same universe as the Dummy Plugin. You can then discover the Dummy Device using DMXWorkshop and configure it's start address over the LAN.